The Morning Plum: The Romney mythology

For some time now, Mitt Romney has been claiming that if Obamacare is not repealed, government will ultimately “control” or “reach” half the economy. The assertion has been completelydebunked. Romney cheerfully continues to make it, anyway.

In essence, Romney has taken a debatable assertion — that government “consumes” 37 percent of the economy — and then hyped it with a nonsensical non sequitur — that the health care law extends the “reach” of government to 50 percent of the economy.

Clearly the Romney campaign does not want to abandon this claim, despite the poor reviews it has received from various experts. But it makes little sense and is frankly a bit foolish — especially for a candidate whose signature legislative achievement as Massachusetts governor was to enact a health care law that at the state level included insurance exchanges, Medicaid expansion, an individual mandate and other provisions that he now claims extends the “reach” of government.

Romney should drop this line from his speeches.

He won’t, of course. And that’s because this claim is of a piece with a much larger falsehood, a narrative that’s central to Romney’s campaign: That Obama is attempting a radical transformation of our free enterprise system into something no longer recognizably American — and that this is what’s holding the recovery back.

That falsehood has taken many forms, whether it’s Romney’s insistence that Obama favors “equal outcomes,” that Obama wants a society in which everyone gets the “same rewards,” his assertion that we are on the verge of ceasing to be a “free enterprise society,” or the latest claim, that Obamacare means that government will “reach” half the economy, whatever that even means.

In this mythology, government is solely to blame for the economic crisis; roll it back, and the recovery, released from Obama-bondage, will roar foward. That’s why Romney tells us that firing 145,000 government workers will put Americans back to work. And yet, Romney’s narrative is the inverse of the truth. Government jobs have declined, and that’s proven a key drag on the recovery. Some economists believe Romney’s vow of more austerity would make the crisis still worse.

Romney’s political strategy may work. Perhaps the experience of the last three years has (understandably) left swing voters so disillusioned with government and the failure to fix the economy quickly enough that they’ll be receptive to any alternative explanation of what’s gone wrong and how to fix it, without paying close attention to the details.

The true nature of the relationship between government and the economic crisis should be central to the presidential campaign. In the wake of Obama’s gaffe about the private sector “doing fine” in relation to the public sector, and in the wake of Romney’s subsequent claim that we don’t need any more cops, firefighters or teachers, we really need more serious scrutiny of the core questions that this presidential race is about.

The spot, which will air in nine swing states, is the latest effort by the Obama campaign to undermine Romney’s aura of economic competence by pointing out that he is offering a sales pitch — corporate “Mr. Fix It” who will apply his skills to the public sector — that he has already offered us before.

Republicans have also urged eliminating deductions to create a simpler, flatter tax code. But they insist revenues should be entirely put into lower rates. Deficit reduction, they maintain, should come from spending cuts and entitlement reforms alone.

some commentators wondered, couldn’t he have chosen different professions to ridicule? And the answer is no. When we talk about public workers, that’s pretty much who we’re talking about. When we look at the unprecedented public austerity in this recession, we’re basically looking at cutbacks on education and public protection.

Obama would have the Republicans over a barrel. He will have offered a huge concession on the high-end tax rates, which the media will note. If the Republicans say no, which of course is likely because the infrastructure bank is socialism and no one wants teachers anyway, then it becomes manifestly clear to swing voters that Republicans are the true obstructionists. Voters will get that Obama will have made a major concession here. They’ll see that the GOP fail to respond in kind, and most of them will draw the logical conclusion.

It’s still unclear to me that voters will care why Obama has failed to get his policies past determined GOP opposition, but it’s definitely an interesting idea.

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Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.